Slate has opened its first showroom, giving prospective buyers a chance to climb into its minimalist electric pickup, inspect customization options and put down a $300 deposit. The Chicago space makes the pitch tangible. It does not yet answer the harder question: whether Slate can deliver the truck at scale.
The Slate Experience Center opened October 15 in Fulton Market, in a former Tesla store staffed in part by former Tesla employees. A black Slate Truck sits at the center of the industrial-barn-chic-meets-SoHo-loft interior, facing a wall of bright color samples. Visitors can explore a prototype, shop for Slate merchandise and pre-order a truck.
The vehicle is listed at $24,950, with a projected range of 205 miles. Its proposition is deliberately spare: plastic body panels, a minimalist cabin and manually operated windows. That last feature is not a technical breakthrough so much as a choice. In an industry that has spent years turning ordinary controls into touchscreen menus, a window crank makes simplicity unusually easy to demonstrate.
Slate is pitching an electric pickup to a market with a pronounced appetite for trucks, but the showroom’s more immediate job is to let people examine what the company is actually offering. A prototype and a set of color options can help a buyer picture ownership. They cannot establish how the finished vehicle will perform, what production will look like or whether the listed price and projected range will translate into the ownership experience customers expect.
On a Monday morning visit, Ars Technica saw a small number of shoppers in the space. One man moved between the cab and the exterior, asking questions of Steve Purdy, Slate’s manager of customer experience. The showroom had launched with a three-day event offering ride-alongs, and Purdy said interest had been strong. He declined to provide sales figures, but described the response as “incredible” and said Slate was “really happy” with the number of $300 deposits.
That is an encouraging signal of interest, not a production report. A deposit and a purchase are different milestones; neither, on its own, says how many trucks Slate can build or deliver. The showroom gives customers a place to test the promise, and gives Slate a visible way to gather early commitments. As the truck approaches production, the more consequential evidence will come from the vehicles that leave the factory—not the color chips on the wall.
Ars Technica previously rode in a Slate Truck over the summer. Its report on the new showroom describes the next step in turning the prototype into a product customers can order. The distinction matters: retail presence can make a startup look established, but manufacturing is where the spreadsheet meets the road.
Sources: Glitch Please! and Ars Technica — https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/10/visiting-slates-first-showroom-as-its-25000-electric-truck-nears-production/ — Reporting on Slate’s first showroom, its truck, and comments from customer experience manager Steve Purdy.
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